Points East

A program of east coast film and video

Monday, August 6, 8:30pm, Symphony Barn

by David Clark

Points East is a program of film and video from the East Coast of Canada. It brings together work by artists who reflect on their surroundings to create poetic and off-beat works, showing a snapshot of life in Canada’s Atlantic provinces. There is a strong history of experimental video and film through NSCAD’s presence as an international touchstone for avant-garde art, as well as the active community-based Centre for Art Tapes and Atlantic Filmmaker’s Co-op in Halifax. Nova Scotia has seen a boom in commercial filmmaking in the last couple of decades, with a steady stream of local and foreign film and television productions. The selection presented here of shorter works is drawn from a large body of independent film from the region. There is a mix of older established artists such as Jan Peacock and Jim MacSwain, and filmmakers like Roberto Santaguida and Graeme Patterson, who have emerged more recently. Many of the artists in this program are ‘come from aways’ (the Nova Scotian term that can be applied generations after you have moved here), but have found themselves engaged in the conversation that continues to intrigue us about a sense of place and identity. The work has many modes and flavours, each presenting a unique lens through which to look at the Atlantic experience.

In contrast, Roberto Santaguida’s verite point of view of a small lane in Halifax’s storied North End is unassuming and without nuance. The camera simply observes as the world goes by, in Gerrish Lane. His work is contemplative and serious as it examines the minutiae of everyday life.

Sol Nagler captures some of the darker histories of Halifax in a lyrical and poetic film: Black Saltwater Elegy. We enter the dreamworld of a graveyard-shift worker and arrive at the disturbing history of dispossession of the Black community of Africville in the city’s North End in the 1960’s.

In contrast to this brooding vision, Helen Hill’s sweet and charming love letter to the North End, Bohemian Town, is brimming with life and whimsy, accompanied by the astonishingly euphoric calypso band Piggy (headed by Helen Hill’s husband, Paul). The film captures a spirit of contemporary life in North End Halifax, where good people do good things and know how to have fun.

Jan Peacock’s introspective work often emerges from a diary-like process of coming to the world through writing and video. Speaking and looking at the world inform the subject and form of her work: This walk, these steps. A dialogue between a man and a woman is performed towards the camera, words attached to tongues, pressed up against a glass surface. These figures speak a language where physical words replace sounds as we also see blurry figures walking through a stone courtyard in an allegorical approach to place and meaning.

In Andrea Dorfman’s There’s a Flower in My Pedal, the interior voice is clearer, spoken over an array of animation and film. This furtive and heart-felt philosophical poem speaks like a manifesto of the Halifax filmmaker’s approach to life.

Animator and artist Graeme Patterson also draws from his own biography to create a beautiful miniature world that is often presented as both sculpture and video. In Grudge Match we see a glimpse of a world of past friendships and lost boyhood, as two miniature figures wrestle in a surreal gym.

Ariel Nasr points “even further east” in his documentary: My Fathers are a Foreign Country. A photograph of his two fathers; the one he grew up with and his biological father, spurs an anxious journey to Afghanistan. The personal and the political are entwined in this compelling road film that takes us both into a foreign world and into the mysteries of the past.

To round off the program, Amanda Dawn Christie brings us Off Route 2, a poignant articulation of the theme of this screening. We see a tranquil and beautiful winter landscape contemplated by an injured woman who hangs suspended from her seat belt in the upside down car she has just crashed. This work articulates what all the works in this screening say in some manner; the world we see is very much a product of the circumstances in which we look at it.

These films show the view from the East of Canada. I hope you enjoy them.